Introduction

This report analyzes the relationship between births attended by skilled health staff and maternal mortality ratios globally for the year 2013. We’ll examine these indicators individually through world maps and explore their relationship through correlation analysis.

Data Loading and Preparation

Data Coverage

The analysis uses skilled birth attendance data primarily from 2013, with missing values filled in from adjacent years where available:

Data sources for skilled birth attendance rates
Year Number of Countries
2012 25
2013 108
2014 21

World Map Visualizations

Births Attended by Skilled Health Staff (2013 ± 1 year)

Maternal Mortality Ratio (2013)

Relationship Analysis

Interpretation

The analysis reveals a strong negative correlation between births attended by skilled health staff and maternal mortality ratios (r = -0.73, p < <2e-16). This indicates that countries with higher percentages of births attended by skilled health staff tend to have lower maternal mortality ratios.

Key findings:

  1. The world maps show clear geographical patterns, with developed regions generally having higher rates of skilled birth attendance (shown in green) and lower maternal mortality ratios (shown in green). In contrast, regions with lower skilled birth attendance (shown in red) tend to have higher maternal mortality ratios (shown in red). Hover over any country to see its specific values.

  2. The scatterplot reveals a clear negative relationship between the two variables, with the trend line showing that as skilled birth attendance increases, maternal mortality tends to decrease. Points are colored by the year from which the skilled birth attendance data was sourced, and hovering over points shows detailed country information.

  3. The correlation is statistically significant, suggesting this relationship is not due to chance. The strong negative correlation (r = -0.73) indicates that approximately 53.5% of the variation in maternal mortality ratios can be explained by the variation in skilled birth attendance rates.

This analysis underscores the critical importance of skilled health professionals in reducing maternal mortality, highlighting the potential impact of increasing access to skilled birth attendance in reducing maternal deaths globally.

Reflections

The AI moved at a very high speed once I gave it the instructions. I was a bit surprised that it did not see the root folder where I created my .Rmd and even after pointing this out, it still did not see the datasets in the same folder.

I have learnt that work can be done much much faster with AI with reasonable accuracy. The knowledge of R, in this instance , is essential.